Call for Proposals

The current Scaling Bitcoin Workshop will take place December 6th -7th at the Hong Kong Cyberport Function Rooms, 3/F., Core E, Cyberport 3 100 Cyberport Road, Hong Kong Tel: (852) 3166 3800 Fax: (852) 3166 3118 . We are accepting technical proposals for improving Bitcoin performance including designs, experimental results, and comparisons against other proposals. The goals are twofold: 1) to present potential solutions to scalability challenges while identifying key areas for further research and 2) to provide a venue where researchers, developers, and miners can communicate about Bitcoin development.

We are accepting two types of proposals: one in which accepted authors will have an opportunity to give a 20-30 minute presentation at the workshop, and another where accepted authors can run an hour-long interactive workshop.

Topics of interest include:

Improving Bitcoin throughput

Layer 2 ideas (i.e. payment channels, etc.)

Security and privacy

Incentives and fee structures

Testing, simulation, and modeling

Network resilience

Anti-spam measures

Block size proposals

Mining concerns

Community coordination

All as related to the scalability of Bitcoin.

Important Dates

undefined - Last day for submission

undefined - Last day for notification of acceptance and feedback

Formatting

We are doing rolling acceptance, so submit your proposal as soon as you can. Proposals may be submitted as a BIP or as a 1-2 page extended abstract describing ideas, designs, and expected experimental results. Indicate in the proposal whether you are interested in speaking, running an interactive workshop, or both. If you are interested in running an interactive workshop, please include an agenda.

All talks will be livestreamed and published online, including slide decks.

Workshop

In recent months the Bitcoin development community has faced difficult discussions of how to safely improve the scalability and decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network. To aid the technical consensus building process we are organizing a pair of workshops to collect technical criteria, present proposals and evaluate technical materials and data with academic discipline and analysis that fully considers the complex tradeoffs between decentralization, utility, security and operational realities. This may be considered as similar in intent and process to the NIST-SHA3 design process where performance and security were in a tradeoff for a security critical application.

Since Bitcoin is a P2P currency with many stakeholders, it is important to collect requirements as broadly as possible, and through the process enhance everyone’s understanding of the technical properties of Bitcoin to help foster an inclusive, transparent, and informed process.

Those with technical interest are invited to participate in this pair of workshops with the following intent:

Phase 1

Scene setting, evaluation criteria and tradeoff analysis.

Montreal, Canada: September 12th-13th, 2015

Scalability is not a single parameter; there are many opportunities to make the Bitcoin protocol more efficient and better able to service the needs of its growing userbase. Each approach to further scaling the Bitcoin blockchain involves implicit trade offs of desired properties of the whole system. As a community we need to raise awareness of the complex and subtle issues involved, facilitate deeper research and testing of existing proposals, and motivate future work in this area.

The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the general tradeoffs and requirements of any proposal to scale Bitcoin beyond its present limits. Session topics are to include the presentation of experimental data relating to known bottlenecks of Bitcoin’s continued growth and analysis of implicit tradeoffs involved in general strategies for enabling future growth.

This event will not host sessions on the topic of any specific proposals involving changes to the Bitcoin protocol. Such proposals would be the topic of a 2nd, follow-on Phase 2 workshop described below; this event is intended to “set the stage” for work on and evaluation of specific proposals in the time between the workshops.

Phase 2 will be planned out further as part of Phase 1 with input from the participants.

Phase 2

Presentation and review of technical proposals, with simulation, benchmark results.

Hong Kong, SAR, China: December 6th-7th, 2015

Hopefully to be easier for the Chinese miners to attend, the second workshop pertaining to actual block size proposals will be in Hong Kong this December.

The purpose of this workshop is to present and review actual proposals for scaling Bitcoin against the requirements gathered in Phase 1. Multiple competing proposals will be presented, with experimental data, and compared against each other. The goal is to raise awareness of scalability issues and build a pathway toward consensus for increasing Bitcoin’s transaction processing capacity or, barring that, identify key areas of further required research and next steps for moving forward.

Preliminarily, phase 2 will be a time to share results from experiments performed as a result of phase 1 and an opportunity to discuss new developments.

How do the Workshops work?

Both events will be live-streamed with remote participation facilitated via IRC for parallel online discussion and passing questions to the event.

These workshops aim to facilitate the existing Bitcoin Improvement Proposals process. Most work will be done outside of the workshops in the intervening months. The workshops serve to be additive to the design and review process by raising awareness of diverse points of view, studies, simulations and proposals.

Layer 2, etc

Network Topologies and their scalability implications on decentralized off-chain networks

PRESENTER(s):

Joseph Poon

10:20

(20 min)

Break

Breaking the chain

10:40

(25 min)

Braiding the blockchain

PRESENTER(s):

Bob McElrath

11:05

(25 min)

Breaking the chains of blockchain protocols

PRESENTER(s):

Yonatan Sompolinsky

11:30

(25 min)

SCP: A computationally-scalable byzantine consensus protocol

PRESENTER(s):

Loi Luu

11:55

(15 min)

Break

Tweaking the chain

12:10

(35 min)

A bevy of block size proposals: 100, 102 and more.

PRESENTER(s):

Jeff Garzik

12:45

(25 min)

A flexible limit: Trading subsidy for larger blocks

PRESENTER(s):

Mark Friedenbach

13:10

(25 min)

Validation-cost metric

PRESENTER(s):

Jonas Nick

13:35

(85 min)

Lunch

Discussion groups

15:00

(180 min)

Discussion groups

18:00

(60 min)

Wrap up from discussion groups, next steps and close

19:00

Reception

Independent Developer Meetup (December 8th-9th)

Cory Fields is organizing an independent developer meetup that will be taking place for 2 days following the Scaling Bitcoin conference. To make it easier for people to attend, the workshop will be held at the same location, Cyberport. Please note: this meetup is not related to Scaling Bitcoin and is explicitly for developers and technical people only. This information is being posted here for convenience. Meetup information can be found here: bitcoin-dev mailing list announcement.

We are sorry, but the event has been sold out.

You will still be able to participate via the live stream, IRC, and Twitter.Due to space limitations, we will not be able to admit anyone at the door.

FAQ

What does it cost?

To encourage continuity of ongoing discussions, all Phase 1 participants are invited to Phase 2 in Hong Kong at $150 USD (same as for Montreal). From November 7th, tickets may be available at $300 USD/ticket -- subject to availability.

The event will be livestreamed, and you will be able to participate via IRC. Although it is naturally easier to participate in person, everyone at the event will have a desk in front of them and will be encouraged to join in online discussions with global participants who are viewing the live stream. It is also important to understand that no decisions are to be made at the workshop. (read more below)

How do I give a presentation?

You can submit your proposal to proposals@scalingbitcoin.org (see CFP above). If you’ve worked on research, we recommend that you post the results, including papers, simulation results, and source code, to the bitcoin-dev discussion list. Depending on the quantity of accepted presentations, the workshop will allot a fair amount of time to each presenter. If people have substantially overlapping plans, they may be suggested to merge. Publishing a paper is NOT required—if you have a good presentation plan, you can propose a detailed summary.

Why Hong Kong?

The second workshop is being planned for Hong Kong to make it easier for the Chinese miners to attend.

Are any decisions made at the workshop?

Absolutely no decisions are made at workshops, as this would run the risk of being rushed and unfair to the global community unable to attend in person. The workshop is about raising awareness of issues and proposals, finding common ground, and encouraging public discussion within the existing mechanism of technical progress through the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process.

Will there be a debate?

There will probably be no debate, and the workshop organizers and participants will be operating with the goal of making the event low-stress and non-confrontational. The intent of the workshops are to showcase diverse points of view and promote open-mindedness in order to improve our collective understanding of how to improve Bitcoin’s scalability. In-person debates could too easily do a disservice to the future of Bitcoin in being about solidifying simplified positions for the purpose of winning political points. It would be unreasonable to entrust the safety and security of the future of Bitcoin to smooth talking at a one-time event rather than deliberate technical study with time for the global community to weigh in.

Can we discuss governance of the Bitcoin projects at this workshop?

These first two workshops in Montreal and Hong Kong are focused on raising technical awareness of scalability issues, simulations and proposals to improve scalability. For now the participants want this to be entirely focused on the science and engineering, which is how Open Source Software development has proven to deliver excellence.

Future Workshops? Workshop BIP?

Some have proposed the workshops become regular events for working on technical issues, after the second currently in planning for Hong Kong. For example, a third workshop has been proposed to be held at MIT’s campus or in New York City. Some have also proposed that we write a BIP on how to organize workshops. These workshops are a work in progress; we will make some mistakes and learn how to do it better the next time. For now, let’s make the first two workshops a success, as that will inform how to define their organization in a written BIP and how to conduct further productive workshops. If you’re interested in discussing future workshops, please join the bitcoin-workshops discussion list.

Opening Party (Saturday 5th December): A very casual and informal opening party will be held at Liberty Exchange from 8-10pm. Some finger foods will be served for 2 hours but you'll need to pay for your own drinks. After 10pm, there will be a walking tour of Lan Kwai Fong.

Reception (Sunday 6th December): At 7pm buses have been arranged to take us from Cyberport to The Hooray Bar and Grill in time for the Symphony of Lights show. There will be unlimited food and drinks for two hours from from 7.30pm-9.30pm.

Closing Reception (Monday, 7th December): From 7pm, unlimited food and drinks will be served for two hours at the end of the conference at Cyberport.